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We would like you to please take a moment and answer these polling questions. This is
info that the EOE would like to collect. Next item we are recording the session and the
link to view will be shared on final slot of the deck today. Q&A format - this is very
important. The questions should be submitted throughout the webinar via the chat function.
At the top of your screen there is a drop down tab with a link to open a chat window
and this is where you will type all your questions, and the default is to “all participants”
so please leave that “all participants” box checked and also be forewarned anything
that you write in the chat is viewable by all the panelists and that’s everyone from
the state office and everyone from ThinkGate, so please be mindful of what you write in
the chat and please try to limit your communications to questions that you would like answered
at the end of the webinar. All the questions received, whether answered during Q&A or not,
will also be included in an FAQ doc and posted along with the video. And the last house-
keeping item, if you’ve registered for the webinar and you have others in the room with
you that have not registered we would appreciate if you could send their names, including their
emails and their school or organizational affiliation, to the email address that is
on the last slide that will be up during Q&A session. We want to be sure that everyone
on the call receives the follow up communications and announcements.
So let’s jump in to the agenda for the day. We are going to be split into four segments,
Number 1, we are going to have some welcome messages from Suzan Kinaci the Program Director
at the EOE and we are going to have a welcome message also from Eric Waynick the CEO of
ThinkGate. The next segment will really be the bulk of our time that is high-level demonstration
of the ETL System, and then we will go into some discussion around the Pilot, the rollout
process and some upcoming events that we have planned over the next several week, s and
we will end it with the Q&A session where we will read from the questions that we have
received during the webinar and answer those questions for you.
So with that, I am going to turn it over to Suzan at the EOE to do the Massachusetts welcome,
Suzan?; Thank you Rob. Could we advance to the next
slide? Welcome everybody some of you may have heard
me on earlier webinars on Edwin Analytics and today we are having the first of our Edwin
Teaching and Learning webinars. I’d like to just point out this graphic that may be
familiar to those of you who attended other presentations on Edwin. As was pointed out
in the Edwin Analytics webinars, the upper left quadrant of the circle is reserved for
Edwin Analytics and the other three are regarding the Teaching and Learning components. Edwin
Analytics is an initiative related to providing information about the early warning indicator
in other reports that are being developed by the department using the data from the
district and this is going to be accessible to the educators through dashboards and other
reports that are being built and made available. There have been a series of webinars on this
topic with the last one scheduled for this Friday. If you have not registered for it
please go ahead and do so on the ESE website. Today’s webinar will be focused on Edwin
Teaching and Learning which is made up of curriculum and assessment tools as well as
digital resources, all of which are aligned to the Massachusetts curriculum framework.
As you can see on the screen provided that you closed out your polling screen, hopefully
you can see all of the graphics there, the curriculum tools will include among other
things the model curriculum maps and model curriculum units which are being developed
jointly in working sessions between the districts and the states. These are to be used as exemplars
and aid in the transition to the common course. So the districts can use these as is or modify
them as they wish to meet their needs, of course they can also create their own.
The assessment tools will provide the ability to build and deliver interim and formative
assessments. They will provide an access to banks of assessment items. There will be reports
on assessment being delivered and results from classrooms, schools, district-wide common
assessments will be available as well. Just also to point out the competency tracking
system for vocational education is going to be part of Edwin and the digital resources
are being offered in partnership with WGBH which is part of PBS learning media and these
will provide easy access to quality online resources to support classroom instructions.
The resources are being tagged to standards and they’ll be available in various formats
that will make it possible to incorporate them into curriculum units, lesson plans and
this will enable the differentiation of instruction and also be possible to use in assessments
as well. And again all of these digital resources will be aligned to the Massachusetts curriculum
framework which will make it possible to use these all together.
Could we move on to the next slide please? Now it may help to provide some context for
some you who may not be aware of how we got to this point. Unlike Edwin Analytics, Edwin
Teaching and Learning is part of the Race to the Top grant which was received by the
state and districts then decided whether they want to participate in Race to the Top or
not, since participation is voluntary, and today we have about 170 districts that are
slated to use the system during the Race to the Top grant period. Beyond that the system
will be made available to all districts across the state. As was the case for Edwin as a
whole, the teaching and learning components were initially envisioned as separate projects
which you see listed here. However over time, it became apparent that putting all these
in a single location accessible through a single sign-on would make it most useful for
educators who would be using it day to day. So the model curriculum units, online interim
formative assessments and the competency tracking system were all rolled into the teaching and
learning system on the technology side anyway. We know that there are separate activities
going on in each of these but the final deliverable of Edwin Teaching and Learning will include
all of these components. As for the history of the project, we started
this as a state initiative between the Executive Office of Education working with Department
of Elementary and Secondary Education and we started off by gathering requirements through
surveys, district visits, vendor demos, stakeholder meetings and numerous meetings as you can
imagine. We then became aware of efforts to implement similar systems in other states
and one of them was Ohio and after some initial comparing of notes, we decided that we should
explore this a little further to see how similar our requirements really were. And the more
we learned about each other and what we are looking for the more is made sense for us
to join forces and try and do this together. Let me state right from the start, this has
not been an easy process. It has taken a lot of blood, sweat and tears for us to get to
this point; however, I know that both states believe we were able to get better results
by doing this together because it is pretty significant effort and we’re able to compare
notes along the way and see what our best practices were and bring different experts
to the table which were all very helpful. To be clear while the bulk of our functionality
requirements are identical, we do have components that make up specific functionality that one
state wanted or needed that the other did not. So while we have jointly procured this
solution from ThinkGate, the final product will be adjusted to meet our individual needs.
And what you see as Elements by ThinkGate in today’s demo will become Edwin Teaching
and Learning in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts it is important to point out that we have
procured this through a software-as-a-service subscription model. So there may be questions
that are going to be coming up based on pricing which we are anticipating we will cover that
a bit later in this presentation but at this point I would like to hand it over to Eric
Waynick the CEO of ThinkGate. Thank You. Good afternoon my name is Eric Waynick I am
the chief executive officer and one of the co-founders of ThinkGate and first of all
let me thank you Suzan, as well as the rest of the Edwin Teaching and Learning selection
team for selecting us as your business partners. We are very excited to be working with both
Massachusetts and Ohio on what is a ground breaking procurement process. It’s very
unique to see the two states work together this closely. While we realize that each state
is individual and you have things you want to accomplish, we appreciated the opportunity
to have validated for our organization some of the things that that we work very hard
to do which will be creating some framework type solutions that will create a lot of flexibility
across a wide variety of requirements. So we would like to say thank you for the opportunity
and we are very excited for the partnership opportunity and thought it would be interesting
to just to give you a little bit of feedback about our organization and who we are.
ThinkGate was founded 9 years ago with very simple premise; we wanted to create a framework,
a technology solution if you would, that will be very flexible, would allow us to solve
problems for educators, help them to be more efficient, more effective in the classroom
and focus ultimately on teaching and learning. The Idea for ThinkGate came out of a meeting
that I had with several principals at what was a quality award in the state of Georgia.
These several principals were being recognized for creating a process that was very unique
in the state at that time. They had come together and built a curriculum, instruction and assessment
solution that was working together to give instructors information that allowed them
to truly differentiate instruction in the class room. They were complaining through
this quality of work conference though that the technology was not available to them that
it’s taking them an incredible amount of time and effort to take the information, the
data, and the insight they had as educators, and compile that information and make it available
so that they could make decisions in the class room that would help spurt innovation and
change and allow them to do something different than they have been doing in the past. They
implemented this process that allowed them to align their curriculum, to provide assessments
that would detail analysis, help them identify the student’s weaknesses or deficiencies
and then provide teaching aids that would truly give the teacher an opportunity to differentiate
that instruction. By implementing this process they saw incredible gains in their student
achievements and teacher moral and they also were able to identify areas where the teaching
staffs were able to work together and mentor each other to create a collaborative environment
that would be beneficial for both the teaching and learning side of the equation. We at ThinkGate
are excited to see what Massachusetts has put together with the Edwin teaching and learning
solution because it validates what we have been working for almost ten years to do, which
was to create a framework that allowed local autonomy, we know that each of the LEAs out
there you have things that you want to do and that you need to do, but at the same point
in time create a level of state consistency that would allow you to share the information
and collaborate among yourselves and create economies of scale and efficiency that you
would not otherwise have. So we were celebrating the opportunity to
partner with you not just because that you are leading innovators in the industry but
also because it helped us understand a dream that we had of putting together a solution
that hopefully you will find easy to use that will allow you to collaborate. But one of
the things that I think makes our solution unique is that we worked with all sizes of
agencies; we worked with very small rural LEA’s, we have one district we like to tell
about that has a thousand students in that district and the superintendent drives a bus
and teaches a class. We also worked with very large urban districts that have won Broad
awards two years in a row with Gwinnett and Charlotte Mecklenburg in two respective states.
We have state agency contracts that we had to prove the scalability of our solution.
So regardless of the size of your LEA or the things you are looking to accomplish we are
confident that we built a solution that you will find is easy to use, that it meets the
needs of your educators and we are excited to be part of the solution, and we look forward
to doing some of the things that we committed to in the purchasing process to understand
that our product and our solution was going need to morph, it would need to be modified,
we would need to make enhancement to that solution, and we have committed ourselves
to both of the states that were involved in this selection process, that as we continue
to build our partnership and we better understand your requirements and your needs, we will
continue to improve our solution, we will make it work for you, the educators, and we
are excited to see how you implement it and the success stories that will be coming out
of the partnership there in Massachusetts. With that, Suzan, I will turn it back over
to Rob and we really do appreciate the opportunity to partner with you and we look forward to
the successes that we will jointly share. Great, thanks Eric, this will move us on to
the demo portion of the webinar, we will be hearing from Steve Campbell, the ThinkGate
service delivery executive for MA, Steve is the primary point person here on the ThinkGate
side assigned to the state of MA for all aspects of the project. Steve will be showcasing a
high level executive overview of the system and please keep in mind that next week and
the following week are the sessions that are designed to dive down into the functional
details, this is a 50,000 front view that will cover a lot of different areas within
the system. He will be touching upon the interface and the navigation, professional development
modules, the curriculum instruction, assessments and reporting tools. So with that let’s
turn this over to Steve. Thank you and good afternoon everyone. We
are excited to take a few moments today and walk everyone through the Edwin Teaching and
Learning system. The demonstration for today is officially going to be in two parts, the
first part is going to be taking a quick view at the administrators screen - this is a screen
that school-based administrators, or district based administrators, could potentially seek
within the application. And then after that we will transition and spend the majority
of our time today in the demonstration looking at the system from a teacher perspective,
from a teacher screen. So that’s how the demonstration will go today, we will take
about 15-20 minutes and walk through this demonstration and then afterwards there will
be a time for Q&A. So on the screen this is the main landing
page for an administrator. Going across the top we see that there are specific quick links
to different aspects of the application such as planning, instruction, assessment and reporting.
These are direct links to those areas, or those worlds, within the application where
you can get greater details about those particular aspects. And then there are some other icons
over here to the right hand side always coming back to the home screen which is what we are
on currently, account information for that particular user. There is a help link and
then a log out selection link. We are going to spend a little bit more time in a few minutes
particularly on the help link when we go in looking at the application from a teacher’s
perspective. As we move down the screen there are boxes on the screen that we refer to as
tiles. These particular tiles maintain different pieces of information as you can see this
first tile deals with the breakdown of the schools in this particular district and their
break down by color, by number. There is also a search feature that can be toggled to search
the specific schools for their information or just the summary screen. We also have a
tile for staff, a tile for classes, and another tile for students. The administrator view
typically has this type of information on the tiles when an administrator logs in and
then they may choose to go to the other areas of that application through the quick links.
The teacher login page is a little bit different and contains more information for the teacher,
actually reducing the number of clicks. And what we will do to go into the particular
teacher that we are going to view today, is under here is the staff tile and we are going
to toggle over to search and we are going to type in the last name of the teacher that
we are going to be looking at today. So when we do that it brings up the teacher’s name
and then I simply select the teacher. And now we are on the main teacher page just as
this teacher would see it if they were to login directly themselves.
So, what is some of the information we see on this page? We have already discussed these
quick links that are listed across the top, those exists for the teacher as well, but
going over to the right we have said that we would delve into this help icon in a little
bit greater detail on the teacher page. Underneath the help icon we see there are some different
aspects that can provide assistance to a particular user on the application any user - administrator,
teacher, whatever, but two I will highlight today. The first one is ThinkGate University,
so I am going to select ThinkGate University and we will go into this particular aspect.
What is ThinkGate University? ThinkGate University is an online professional development system
that all users have access to, whereby they can go in and receive specific help and feedback
on the particular aspects of Edwin Teaching and Learning system. So beyond some traditional
health mechanism such as, just a user guide or things of that nature, this truly is a
robust and interactive professional development system, that users can utilize to get the
information that they need and accomplish very specific tasks. In this case what we
see on the screen is that this particular user has be assigned various courses, most
of these that we see here on the screen in this example deals with the creation of the
classroom assessments and so forward, and under the current courses we see that the
some courses or modules that have been completed by the particular user and other information
related to that. The users can be assigned various courses that relate specifically to
their roles within an LEA. And so let’s take a moment and go into one of these particular
modules, such as creating classroom assessments. Once that is selected we see a screen that
provides a little bit more information about that particular module and over on the right
hand side, a user at this point would select “Watch this course”. Another window opens
up and shows the user that the various parts that make up this module for creating classrooms
assessments, there happens to be 4 parts and the user can see the progress that they made
on each one of these parts. So whenever a user utilizes ThinkGate University, they don’t
necessarily have to complete the entire module in one sitting, it is designed and based around
people’s schedule so that they can do different aspect of the module spread out over time
if they need to in order to get the information that they need. In this particular sample
we see that a user has started progress on this first two indicated by these grey checks
here which indicate “In progress”. There is actually one section that they have completed
which is this one here, and at the end of all the modules an assessment is given to
the user, where they have to perform the task that they learned about in the module and
they can see their proficiency at the end of the assessment and the system will tell
them if they have mastered those components, or if they have not mastered those components
and need to go back and do some remediation. What we will do to kind of go to the next
step is, how would a user go through modules. We will show the very beginning of this today
before we go back to the main teacher page of the Teaching and Learning system. So if
I were to go into this module, to continue on, I will simply select it and it will launch
that particular module. So on the screen the module has come up in a new window; it tells
the user what the module is about, the task that will be covered in the module, and so
forth. And so I simply progress through by clicking the Next button. On this screen it
gives me a little bit more information about what is to be expected and so I want go Next,
and this is the final screen and basically provides a scenario for the user, a real-life
scenario of how using this particular information would be beneficial and how accomplishing
the task of module can benefit the user. So we will select Next which will launch the
module and this is where the interactive piece of the ThinkGate University will begin that
the user can progress through in order to see how the platform functions, where they
need to click in order to perform certain task, etc., as they go through the module.
So ThinkGate University, a great professional development system that can provide lots of
wonderful information to users, administrators, teachers and the like to help them accomplish
the various tasks that they need to do any time of the day since it’s the part of the
application and its web based, they can access this at anytime.
So we will close this out and then we will go back to our page earlier and focus on one
other aspect under the Help menu, which is the Reference Center. What the Reference Center
does is bring up information all in PDF form for all aspects of the Teaching and Learning
system. There is various search criteria that a person may use to narrow their search down,
so I am going to look at some reference guides based on the user group of teachers under
this support framework. I simply select “Find References”, and I can see here that there
are some quick start guides here in the Reference Center that deal with log in to the platform
and how to navigate around the platform, etc. And I simply view this information by selecting
the View icon. The PDF will load on the screen and what the user can find is an overall explanation,
with screen shots, and then step-by-step instructions to either perform the task, or step-by-step
instructions to explain what a user would see on a particular screen as they scroll
through. So this will guide the user into just kind of a different way of looking at
the platform and getting the information that they need. Since this is a PDF document these
can be printed out and saved for future use, or they can be saved to your desktop, but
they will always exist and reside in the Reference Center of the Edwin Teaching and Learning
platform. So we have talked about the areas across the
top, so let’s get into the main part of the screen and what we see. We discussed earlier
how these are referred to as tiles and what a teacher sees when they log in, at the top
is one carousel; this is a carousel of tiles and the reason we call it carousel is because
if there are additional tiles beyond the three, I can select and those will rotate over to
see any additional tiles that I may have in this top carousel. For a teacher, the icons
or tiles in the top carousel are always their classes. So for this particular teacher I
see that there is a fifth grade home room class, there’s period one, a period two
fifth grade mathematics class, a period three fifth grade language arts class, etc.
So for a teacher, all of their particular classes are here in this top carousel and
there is a couple of things that we need to explore further on this tile. For instance,
in this center tile, I see an icon here that will just toggle the view of the students
I have here in the main part of my tile. Currently I see the student’s picture and their name
and another icon that deals with assessment results that I can go to directly if I want,
but I can toggle that view and it will simply put everything in a list view that a person
can scroll through at that point. So there are some different options there
on how you read the information within the tile and then over on the right hand side,
this particular Icon that you can see is an Expand icon you will see this icon throughout
the Edwin Teaching and Learning platform on most of the tiles that you encounter and it
does exactly what is says it will do. It expands that tile and provides the user addition information
in greater detail than what is on the tile. So in this case, if I select the Expand icon,
it will go into the fifth grade mathematics class for period two and show me some identification
information, some demographics information represented in graphical form, information
about sub groups in this particular class along with all my student names down the right
hand side that we saw earlier on the tile. A few things that a user can do here is that
they can select pieces of the pie chart once that is selected, notice on the right hand
side the students that fall within that particular area are highlighted on the right-hand side
of the screen. A user can clear those highlights out; they can select another portion of the
pie chart to see those particular students, etc. So it’s just an expanded view of the
tile that provides users additional information about their class. Of course any of the students
listed here I can always select their name to find out additional information, identification
information, about those particular students. Now, we’ve talked about the top carousel
and the tiles that exist here, let’s bring up some additional information in the bottom
carousel that we’ll display here about these particular classes. When a link is selected,
such as period two 5th grade mathematics, once that link is selected, what the user
will see populate along the bottom potion of the screen, is a second carousel and all
of the tiles that exist within this carousel fill directly with the class that I selected.
Notice how the other classes have grayed out on the screen so the user will always know
what this information is and which class this information pertains to. In our example here
it pertains to the second grade 5th mathematics tile. So what have we got along the bottom
carousel? We have got a tile that is related to assessments, we have a tile related to
assessment results, and then over on the next page of the carousel we see more information
around curriculum and instructional types of information. That is where we are going
to spend the next few moments, is talking about some of these tiles here.
Imagine if you will a day in the life of a classroom teacher. More than likely they are
going to spend the majority of their day and time, especially initially, thinking about
their instruction, the types of standards and curriculums that they are going to be
working on for that day or that week. So here in this first tile we see all of our standards
listed, our Common Core standards, our mathematical standards, are listed here and I can see those
laid out, and of course there are links next to each set of standards that a user can select
that will provide that user additional information about the standard - Standard identification,
any content related to the standard. And then I have another tile over here on the right
hand side that deals with various resources. These are digital resources that are tied
directly to this particular common core standard that I have selected. So in this case there
are numerous resources that happen to be available in this example type for this particular standard.
For digital resources these can really exist in a variety of formats, these can be digital
audio file, video files, these can be PDF or word documents, these can be web links
to outside web pages and really a variety of things that can be loaded and tied directory
to the individual standard. So now I want to close this particular screen
out and we are back to where we were earlier. We just talked about the information that
a user can gain from the Standard’s tile. This center tile is entitled Instructional
Plans. In a couple of weeks we will be conducting a webinar that will go into much greater detail
around the instructional aspects of the Edwin Teaching and Learning system, but for today,
just a quick overview, specifically related to these tiles. Instructional plans are a
way to organize lots of information around a particular grade, so in this case 5th grade
math instructional plan can be created and when a user selects this plan they will go
into another screen to where lots of additional tiles will present themselves. Some of those
tiles will consist of pacing for how the standards of 5th grade math could potentially be taught
throughout the upcoming week or month, or whatever the case may be in the calendar functions
around that. There are tiles related to lesson plans, there are tiles related to any district
or classroom assessment that have been specifically created and tied directly to that instructional
plan along with any digital resources that have been populated and tied to the instructional
plan. So again, we will talk about those in the coming weeks and go into greater detail.
The final tile here that we see on the screen which is similar to one we saw before when
we selected one of our standards, is another Resource tile. The difference here is that
these are resources that are tied to all of the 5th grade mathematics standards. Again
these formats can vary from PDF to word document, web links etc. These are digital resources
that can be tied directly to all 5th grade mathematical standards within Edwin Teaching
and Learning platform. So, in the day of the life of a teacher they
would probably live in this world for a period of time dealing with aspects related to curriculum
and instruction and then they may come back over here and deal with areas of assessment.
So, let’s talk about these for just a quick moment and what we see on the screen.
First, I can toggle the view from within the tile, from the List view back to a graphical
view. I can expand the tile to see additional information about the district assessments.
I can filter what presents in the tile, the type of information that is presented in the
tile, by changing any of these criteria if I so choose. But down in the tile there are
a couple of icons that we want to explore. Anytime a user sees this type of icon that
consist of a green thumbs up, that means the assessment has been proofed and finalized,
it is ready to be administered. Any time an icon exist with a pencil over it that means
for that particular assessment, it has been created but it is not finished, it is still
in edit mode and the user will need to go in and complete out the assessment to finalize
and proof the assessment before it can be administered. We also have a Print icon so
the assessment can be printed and there is also an Administration icon and again on next
week’s webinar we are going to go into much greater detail about the creation of assessments
and how those assessments are also administered. So we have a district assessment tile, we
have a classroom assessment tile that is very similar to what we just examined over here
on the district tile. Also one point to make note of is the Add New icon down here at the
bottom of the screen. This is how a user would add or create a new assessment and again we
will discuss that next week. Finally on a screen over to the right where
we see a tile that consist of assessment results. This is where a teacher can get a quick view
of any, in this case, district level assessment that have been administered to where there
are scores. Teacher can have a quick view about how their class is progressing, what
is their performances is like, a user can toggle over to classroom assessment and see
the same type of information and so really on one screen the teacher can gain a lot of
information and do lots of particular tasks really without having to make a number of
clicks or go in to too many other screens in order to find out the information that
they need. Lastly we have our Expand icon which we have
talked about before and if the user wanted to see additional details about assessment
results, they can simply select that Expand icon and see the greater information and more
detailed information, in this case, about assessment results. Again, as stated earlier,
we will talk more next week at the creation of assessments, and looking at data and the
various types of reports the user can run. But for today this concludes this portion
of the demonstration around over all navigation of the Edwin Teaching and Learning system,
but I will be available at the end to our call today during the Q&A session to answer
any questions that I can. Alright great, thanks Steve, for doing that
demonstration. Hopefully you all on the phone will have the chance to meet Steve at some
point here in the very near future. Very quick reminder about the submission of questions
for those who may have joined late. To submit a question please do so through the chat function.
If you hover over the green bar at the top of the screen you should be able to open up
the chat function and submit your questions that way. We will be moving to answer those
questions momentarily. Before we get to next steps, and the upcoming events segment, I
would like to share with you couple of comments from some clients that we have been working
with for a number of years. Dr. Greg Firn is the Superintendent of Anson
County schools in NC, Dr. Firn and I had the chance to sit down last weekend talk about
the partnership between Anson county and ThinkGate. This is what he said:
“So by partnering with ThinkGate we have been able to accomplish a great deal most
importantly the improvement in student learning and achievement and I think that is direct
reflection of what ThinkGate have allowed us to do. We have realized student improvement
through improved instruction. Improved instruction has happened because our teachers are more
informed. They are informed not only because of the assessment modules, but also because
of their ability to design and execute lessons and refine those that we have been able to
build using ThinkGate. And what we have been able to develop with ThinkGate’s leadership
on this is, a platform that includes not only those task analyses that I mentioned but also
resources, so we pre-populate with resources based on this tool. It’s a fillable document;
it is a shareable document, so that means that whenever teachers are working on this
others can look at it. It is one of the most unique and time-saving tools that’s on the
market right now. We are very excited because ThinkGate listened and they worked with us
to develop this and our teachers find it absolutely invaluable.”
Alright Dr Firn is a very enthusiastic supporter of ThinkGate. He has played a very important
role in the development and evolution of our curriculum and instruction tools that you
all will ultimately be able to use in your own LEAs.
Next is Miss Lorna Gallimore. Lorna is a testing coordinator at Gwinnett County schools in
Atlanta, Georgia. Gwinnett is a very high profile district we have worked with in the
past six or seven years. As Eric mentioned earlier today in 2010 they were the recipients
of the Rhode Prize for Education. We have enjoyed our partnership with Gwinnett. It
has driven significant growth for both of our organizations. Some thoughts from Ms.
Gallimore: “Gwinnett is a district which is known for
always being on the cutting edge of what’s next and so being a partner with ThinkGate
has allowed us to move into areas where most other providers and companies really have
not yet ventured. It has also allowed us to develop a partnership which benefits, I believe
in the long run, both of us in terms of a vision that we have of what we call our next
generation 21st century/assessments, so that again the things like the Common Core and
PARC assessments that will be coming, we are able to make preparations for now and start
to look at the kind of content we need in these assessments, and also what technology
we need, in order to be able to support our schools as we move forward into the 21st century.”
Ok just a couple of third-party perspectives from existing clients. Hopefully you were
able to glean some value from that. The next thing we are going to is to take
a couple of minutes to go over the roll out plan and some upcoming events, Suzan will
manage this with you. Suzan? Yes please and Rob when we are presenting
could you just kind of scroll over and show how to pull up the chat box for the folks
who may be confused. I am going to ask Deb Klein who is our project manager for the roll
out and the pilot to take over this part of the segment.
OK great and before you do that I’ll just share with you because you can’t see the
controls from my screen, so everyone should see a green bar at the top of the screen and
when you hover over it, it will drop down. Click on the chat segment, that will open
your chat box and that is where you type in your question. So, hopefully we can get you
guys into the chat functionality. I just saw coming on the chat box once people
see a demo of this system or hear about Edwin Teaching and Learning system the first thing
they ask is, “When can we get this? And the good news to the answer is really pretty
soon. Our plan is that we will be able to implement the system with all race to the
top districts that have signed up for the teaching and learning project between now
and March of 2014. We are starting with several pilot groups this school year, including three
groups one starting March one starting in April and one starting in May. We have the
people lined up for our March pilot but we are developing the list of LEA’s to work
with us later in this school year and if you are interested in participating, please email,
you will see the Edwin mailbox, it will show up on the last slide, please email us there
and let us know and we will definitely be trying to get as many of you in as possible.
We will also be implementing over the summer and if you district is interested in that
we know some districts have staff on the board over the summer and some don’t but if you
think that might work for you also send us an email to EDWIN for that. All of the remaining
RTTT districts will be implementing during school year 13-14 between September and March
so as I mentioned before, this is coming very soon,
So as I said this is coming very soon to lot of districts. As Suzan said earlier, once
we conclude the RTTT we will be making the system available for more districts as well.
One thing that people have asked is to know a little bit more about the pilot. The pilot
is a little bit different than the wider implementation. They are usually started with a smaller with
a handful of educators you can add more as you go along but generally during the pilot
there is good reason to start with a smaller group and some of those have to do with what
information is available during the pilot period. The way that Edwin Teaching and Learning
is going to know which students, teachers, and courses are occurring in your district,
is the that information eventually is going to come to us though SIF which is the School
Interoperability Framework. Now don’t get worried I am not going to bore even a lot
of technical talk but basically that SIF is just a way for schools to move the data between
schools or to the state in a standard format, and the reason we want to use SIF is that
it also makes it easier to move data more frequently, so that the data you see in Edwin
Teaching and Learning would be the latest and greatest, it will be near real time. Most
districts have not implemented SIF yet so we can’t use SIF data at this time. What
we are going to rely on for the pilot period is data that you submit to the state for your
October 1 report some of it may get refreshed in March, but it’s not brand new data, so
if you have changes that occur after that submission they are not going to be able to
be reflected in Edwin during the pilot and so that is one limitation during the pilot,
it’s not going to be near real time data. Another thing is that during the pilot period
we are going to have the common core standards loaded and that would be for ELA and Math.
We will not have science or social studies so that will affect either the number of educators
who will find the system ideal for them to be using at that time. Later we will have
all the standards of the MA framework loaded in there but we are talking about during the
pilot period just having that smaller set of standards.
One other thing that you may want to note as you think through how and when you may
want to implement in you district, is that the Edwin teaching and learning training model
will have a train-the-trainer model, where each district will send three educators to
a very comprehensive training session a three day session and then those people will serve
as your local experts within your district train other staff and also service as a resources
and we find that a lot of districts use this model with a lot of success. So at this point
I am going to turn back to Suzan. She has a few other items to cover.
Ok thanks Deb. As Deb mentioned we are working on connecting the various systems that are
all going to need to fit together to make Edwin T&L work as envisioned and this is going
to take a while so not all of them will be available for the pilot, as Deb mentioned.
The system is going to be evolving during the with new functionality coming on board
some of state specific functionality as we mentioned coming on board as well. So we are
going to ask our pilot district to be patient with us and with ThinkGate as we continuously
improve the system over the next few months. Your input during the pilot will be very valuable
to us. Now, as for the pricing, the state will be
paying for the subscription during the grant period and we are exploring the way for covering
the cost for districts beyond that time. However one of the main benefits of doing procurement
with Ohio is that by combining the number of students in both the states, we believed
we have achieved the economies of scale that resulted in very attractive pricing even if
for some reason the legislature doesn’t come through with the dollars to make it possible
for the state to pick up the tab. One reason it is difficult to give a specific dollar
figure is because the use of the system is voluntary. So the more users the lower per
pupil cost that as you can imagine. What we can say now is that based on what
we know from our district surveys and visits, the per student cost of this integrated system
which includes those curriculum and assessments and access to high quality digital resources,
is considerably lower than what individual districts we know are paying for standalone
curriculum or assessment systems. Regarding the upcoming event, I see the slide has advanced
already, you can see them on the screen. We do have couple of more webinars coming up
and today’s webinar will be recorded and we will provide that link and we have some
training sessions coming up for our pilot LEA’s between Feb and May. And ThinkGate
is also going to be attending the model curriculum work session in April and may be attending
a similar session with the online interim formative assessments advisory group around
the same time. We are working to plan all these out, as you can imagine. I believe that
is it for us Rob. Ok thank you Suzan. Let’s roll forward and
start the Q&A segment we have about 10 minutes left and we will answer as many questions
as we can in that time frame. And we will also post all of these questions in an FAQ
doc that will be accessible on the very bottom url that you see on your screen right now.
In addition there are some contact info there if you would like to reach out to anybody
in the state or anybody here at ThinkGate, so we will keep this on your screen for your
reference while we go through the Q&A process. We have a number of questions coming in. I
would like to ask and introduce Mr. Gary Herron is here with us at ThinkGate Gary is the executive
sponsor for ThinkGate, he really has the responsibility for the architecture of the overall system,
the first question is: Q. Are you building this software from scratch
or basing it on something you have already created and used with other districts?
A. As Eric indicated earlier we have been in business for over 9 years now so this software
product has actually existed for 9 years. It is gone through annual release updates
and a couple pretty significant version updates, but it is an existing piece of software that
is in place and many, many districts throughout the country, we are doing some customizations
and especially some integration work on the product to make it integrate tightly with
other systems that MA will be using. So there are some updates planned to the system primarily
around integration, but the base product is in existence and in use in other districts.
Alright thanks Gary. We have a number of other questions; we have a few for Steve, Steve
let’s flip it over to you. And I know you have a couple of questions and if you don’t
mind, if you could read those off and respond to those for the group, I would appreciate
it. Thanks Rob, good questions have been coming
in during the course of the demonstration today and I will be addressing just a couple
of those. Very quickly one of the questions was;
Q. Can assessment be created that are administered on the larger scale based on the set of standards
that the user selects? A. The answer is Yes. Both teachers can create
assessments directly for their own classes, they can even share those assessment with
other teachers, as well school-based or district level individuals, non teachers, can also
create, what we refer to as district assessments. If you recall in the demonstration that was
one of the tiles I discussed today, and showed on the bottom carousel was district assessments,
so that can be created and sent out and shared with a much larger audience.
Q. What subjects can be assessed besides ELA and math?
A. All course subjects ELA, Math, Science and social studies can be assessed, additionally
as other standards are brought into the Edwin Teaching and Learning system such as vocational
technical types of standards and potentially others, assessments could be created for those
types of courses and subjects also. Q. Can we create assessment for all grades,
even kindergarten and 1st Grade? A. Yes, Assessment can be created for all
the grades, including K & 1, provided that standards exists for those particular grades,
but assessments can be created for all of those particular grades.
Rob? Alright thanks Steve, Suzan I know you guys
have received a few questions on pricing, item banks, etc. please take a couple of minutes
and answer those. Sure, regarding the Item Banks, I wasn’t
sure I would get enough time to talk about those so I am glad the questions are coming
in. There will be released MCAS items that are being tagged to the MA curriculum framework
that will be made available on an ongoing basis in the system. Right now we are in the
process of evaluating whether those released items will be able to be part of the pilot
and if not then our conversations with ThinkGate have resulted in agreement to get some NWEA
items into the pilot, should the MCAS release items integration piece not be completed by
then. The NWEA items that will be used in the pilot will not be possible to be used
in school year 13/14 since by then we also hope to have all of our MCAS released items
in there. And as you know, the MCAS items cover grades three through eight and grade
ten and our assessment department is aware of the fact that K-1 for example is not in
there so they are looking into how best to fill that gap, but the released items are
the ones that are going to be in there and for districts who may have licensing agreements
with providers such as NWEA, they will be able to utilize this system in conjunction
with those items. Now regarding the pricing I think I have said
everything I am able to say at this time, we, there will be perhaps more information
that will come out but in the short term this is going out to the RTTT districts, free of
cost during the grant period, and for the post grant period the cost is going to be
averaged out based on the number of users, but even in the highest tier of cost, we think
that you are going to find that advantageous should the state not be able to cover that
cost. That is still something that the executive office of education is working to make possible
so that there will be no cost incurred by the district if this is able to pass the legislature.
I do see a question from the 7 hills charter public schools and off the top of my head
I am not sure if you are RTTT and if you are that means you are on our list of the 170,
we are in the process of rounding out our next two pilot cohorts. So, you can send an
email to the email address you see on the screen at Edwin@doe.mass.edu and you can expect
to hear from Deb accordingly. Another question that just came in is if a
district creates an assessment to be given at a grade level can that assessment be hidden
until the day it is administered so that the teachers don’t get access? That’s a Steve
question. Steve do you have that question on your screen?
Yes I do, very quickly the answer to that question is yes. There are some capabilities
within the platform dealing with our assessment scheduling capabilities that can just do that.
The assessment can officially be locked down until a district chooses to administer it
so that that content cannot be accessed. And there are some other features built around
that as well as far as results and how long results are posted and can be accessed as
well. So answer to that question is yes. Q - There was also one other question very
quickly that was asked about any assessments that are posted for use, are they put through
any type of criteria for quality assurance? Since all assessments are created and maintained
by the LEA themselves either at the district level or the classroom level, that quality
assurance process is also left up to the LEA itself. So the LEA directly will be the ones
handling any type of quality assurance process that they deem appropriate for their particular
situation. Ok Rob let me just take out one other question
that I saw up there real quick, and then the ones we did not get to we will be covered
in the FAQ. Q - There was a question about the VTCTS and
whether there will be separate training for that?
So any functionality that may not be in the product right now which may be part of MA
specific, will have additional training. There will not be one that is specific to VTCTS
but any training that is require of functionally that is not currently in the product will
be in subsequent trainings for folks who are coming on board later on. So with that I think
we have done our 1 pm mark. It’s all your Rob.
Alright thanks Suzan. We had a lot of questions and several more that we were not able to
answer; those which have not been answered will be added to the FAQ document, and once
again please bookmark that url at the bottom of the page you see right now so you can access
the recorded video and the FAQ document and the links to the upcoming webinars. So again
we would just like to thank you for your time today. We are very excited to be working with
MA and we look forward to meeting you all in the very near future. Have a great day.